


Deeper than it looks

by Kacka



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 18:53:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14837255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kacka/pseuds/Kacka
Summary: Clarke has seen Bellamy at his best, at his worst, has seen pieces of him he's never shown to anyone else. But somehow, she's never seen him shirtless.





	Deeper than it looks

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt on tumblr: "Clarke seeing Bellamy's bare chest for the first time in canon or whatever."

Clarke knocks and then shifts uncomfortably on her feet. She shouldn’t feel awkward about visiting her best friend’s cabin at any time of day, but at this hour, with dew glistening on the grass and mist curling between the trees, she would bet he’s still asleep. And that he likely isn’t alone.

But the heavy tread across the groaning wooden floors she hears does not belong to Echo. She tries to steel herself for the sight of him, but even after months of seeing his face every day, her heart flies to her throat like it’s the first time in six years.

He’s sleep-rumpled and bleary-eyed, a ruddy tint beneath his freckles that suggests a warm, hard sleep. She wants to comb fingers through his hair where it’s mussed from his pillow.

She stays where she is.

“Clarke?” He asks, bewildered. The fog of sleep clears, his gaze sharpening as his eyes dart past her, scanning for danger. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

He sags against the doorframe, rubbing at the bridge of his nose.

“You woke me up to give me a status report that we’re not under attack? For future reference, that’s the kind of thing that can wait until I’ve gotten a full night’s sleep.”

“Sorry, old man.” She smirks when he scowls at her. “I didn’t wake you up for a status report. Madi and I are going to play hooky today to celebrate getting the valley back. Thought you and the space kru might want to join.”

“You? Playing hooky?” He crosses his arms and smirks back. “Why, Clarke Griffin, are you turning into a bad influence?”

“Didn’t think you’d mind, Mr. Whatever-the-hell-we-want.”

His smirk broadens into a genuine smile that warms Clarke to her toes. “We both know I’ve come a long way from that.”

With the gentle light of dawn filtering through the trees and the easiness between them, she wants to wrap herself in the softness of the moment, sink into it like a morning mattress that she never wants to leave.

She backs away instead, a smile on her own face. “You have,” she agrees. “But I think you still have that rebellious streak somewhere in there. If so, spread the word and meet us at the Rover in half an hour. I want to get out of here before the rest of the camp wakes up.”

“I don’t take orders from you,” he teases, but starts toward Harper and Monty’s cabin. Clarke turns away to find Raven, smiling all the way there.

Summer is coming on, humid in Eden like it wasn’t in the ruins of Polis or the wasteland between. The day trip had been Madi’s idea, and it was so tempting Clarke couldn’t have turned her down even if she’d wanted to. They don’t tell any of the others where they’re headed, letting their speculation turn into a game as they drive.

Clarke tries not to, but can’t help noticing that despite the way Echo teases Bellamy about his theories, they aren’t sitting anywhere near each other. It becomes her own private guessing game, trying to figure out what they are to each other these days. Picking at the scab to keep it from healing.

“We’re here!” Madi announces, jolting Clarke from her thoughts. She hops out of the Rover before it’s at a complete stop, and the next thing Clarke knows, her friends are all piling out of the back of it as well.

Bellamy meets her where she jumps down from the driver’s seat, lips crooked and eyes shining.

“Oh, good. We left one patch of woods to come to another, completely identical patch of woods. What a great vacation.”

Clarke cocks her head to one side, feigning a frown. “Do you hear something?”

He sobers with the flip of a switch, his defensive instincts kicking in.

“I don’t--” He starts to say, but pauses when he makes out the sound. Awe overtakes his face. “Is that--”

The others, having followed Madi to the source of the noise, whoop and cheer. Clarke lets her smile off its leash.

“See for yourself.”

Clarke is smug as anything by the time the river comes into view, its winding course emptying here into a series of several small waterfalls, each emptying into an area just shallow enough for Madi to reach the bottom, but deep enough to swim in. The water swirls white around the rocks, a lazy current carrying it forward to each cascading step down.

Raven has already shucked her pants and is re-buckling her brace, Murphy digging his heels in as Emori tries to push him into the small pool before them.

“This is amazing,” Bellamy breathes, eyes alight with excitement. “I can’t believe a place like this still exists.”

“I can’t believe you ever doubted me, Blake.” She nudges him forward, climbing down the rocks to where Madi left her shoes and socks.

Clarke frowns when she sees that Madi wore her pants into the water, but understands. It hasn’t been that long since everyone returned to the ground. She’s still a little shy around these virtual strangers.

But that’s going to make for an uncomfortable ride home.

“I never doubted you,” Bellamy says, sitting beside her to start unlacing his own boots. He says it as a joke, but it lands with more weight than she thinks he meant it to.

“And after this, you never will,” she says, light.

His eyes meet hers. She’s caught in his gaze. For a moment it looks like he might say something, but before he can get the words out, she ducks her head, dangles a foot off the rock to kick water at him. He flinches back, laughing, and the moment is broken.

“Quit stalling already,” she teases, standing and shedding her pants, and feeling both self-conscious and grateful for the way he doesn’t watch her do it. “I want to swim.”

“Oh, you want to swim?” A devious look enters his eye and Clarke regrets her words.

“Bellamy--”

“Then let’s go for a swim, Princess,” he says, rushing her like in those old wrestling matches her dad used to watch on the Ark, tossing her over one shoulder and propelling them both off the rock, into the water below.

It’s cold and refreshing, waking every nerve in Clarke’s body. Or maybe that’s a byproduct of her proximity to Bellamy she thinks, her hands on his broad shoulders, pushing down with her whole body weight to dunk him the moment he surfaces.

Their roughhousing doesn’t last long. Madi joins them, and then Raven steals Clarke away, Bellamy gets pulled into a splash fight with Harper and Echo, and for the first time in six years, Clarke feels as if she’s truly a part of a group, rather than just a pair.

They swim and play until their stomachs growl, and then they crawl up onto the rocks to eat the spread Clarke had packed for them. They’re in varying states of undress, but there’s no tension between them, sexual or otherwise. It’s pure fun. The kind they so rarely get to have on the ground.

Madi pulls Murphy into a race after lunch, showing him the best way to ride the waterfalls all the way from the highest point to the lowest. Bellamy takes one look at Clarke, full and content in her patch of sunlight, and says, “I’ll go make sure they don’t crack their heads open.”

“Thanks,” Clarke murmurs, too comfortable to even think about moving.

Well, moving far.

She scoots forward so that her feet and ankles bob in the current. Leans back on her hands, then her elbows, then all the way to her back, closing her eyes against the bright sun.

 _Just_ _for a moment_ , she thinks, her friends’ laughter and trash-talking a cocoon around her. It sounds like happiness.

Of course, a moment turns into several moments, turns into Clarke drifting off for a lazy afternoon nap. When she wakes, her head is resting on Raven’s lap, her fingers combing through Clarke’s hair as she and Emori chat in low voices.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty.” Raven teases, tugging on a red strand when she sees that Clarke is awake. “Thought we were going to have to get you true love’s kiss here in a minute, or else we’d all be stuck out here.”

“Madi could drive you home,” Clarke points out, sitting up slowly.

“Yeah, I was more focused on getting you and your true love to pull your heads out of your asses, but whatever,” Raven snorts.

Clarke finds her daughter perched on Bellamy’s shoulders, laughing at something he’s saying, but Madi’s delight can only hold her attention for a moment.

The much more riveting sight is that the shoulders Madi is sitting on are no longer covered, though the way the drenched fabric had stuck to his skin hadn’t left much to the imagination.

If she looked, she’s sure she would see his shirt laid out on a rock to dry, but she can’t look away. Not when there’s so much bronze skin on display, freckles dripping over his shoulder blades, muscles bunching and rippling when he moves. His arms are massive, which she knew but tried not to dwell on, but the planes of his chest are new territory for her. She wants to map them, draw them, explore them with her fingers and lips and--

“Case in point,” Raven says, amused. “How can you even deny the way you’re looking at him right now?”

It takes Clarke a moment to find her voice.

“I’m not denying anything,” she says, hoarse from sleep and wanting. “He’s with someone else.”

The reminder breaks her trance and she looks down at the rock, tries to memorize its contours the way Bellamy’s body is now burned into her brain.

The rock is much less compelling.

“He and Echo broke up,” Emori says. “Months ago. I thought he would have told you.”

_We didn’t talk about her. I didn’t want to know, she thinks._

And then, _He’s not involved with anyone_ hits her and she doesn’t know what to think.

“He didn’t,” she says, letting herself drink him in again. He catches her this time, like a magnet snapping into place, and she thinks she sees a mirror of her own lust flash dark in his eyes.

“You guys are insufferable,” Raven decides, tilting her face toward the sun. “It’s a good thing we never put any money on the two of you.”

“Agreed, but for different reasons,” Clarke says, slipping into the water.

Bellamy lets Madi off his shoulders and she starts to swim toward Clarke, when Echo calls to her in Trig. She pauses, torn.

“Go ahead,” Clarke says, smiling at her daughter but prickling with awareness of the man standing behind her. “You don’t have to hang out with me.”

“I know that.” Madi rolls her eyes. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“I’ll keep her company,” Bellamy says. Clarke shivers at the promise in his voice.

“Is that okay with you?” Madi asks.

Clarke gives her a teasing shove. “Yes. I’m a big girl. You don’t have to worry about me. Besides, I want to show Bellamy the big waterfall. You go have fun.”

Madi accepts this and swims away. Clarke watches her go, startling when Bellamy’s voice comes through much closer than she anticipated.

“There are more waterfalls?”

His bare chest is so close to her shoulder she can almost feel the rumble of his voice.

“If you don’t mind a bit of a walk. It’s a little way down the river.”

 _If you don’t mind a bit of privacy_ , she doesn't say aloud. Bellamy has always been able to read between the lines and he nods.

“Lead the way.”

They pick up a conversation as they wade downriver, then climb out to pick their way across the rocks. Bellamy holds out a hand to steady her when s e almost slips, then keeps ahold of it. She doesn’t pull away this time.

Like before, they can hear the thunder of the waterfall before they see it. It’s a big enough drop to make for a curtain of water raining down on the rocks below. Clarke tosses Bellamy the kind of smirk she knows he’ll take as a challenge.

“You never doubt me, right?” She asks, dropping his hand and wandering toward the edge. “Feel like a leap of faith?”

“Clarke,” he starts, eyes wide, but she takes a running jump off the rock before he can finish his thought, plummeting into the much deeper pool below.

When she breaks the surface, he’s already halfway through the air. She laughs at the ungraceful way he hits the water, kicking toward where he went down. She expects him to come back up in the same place, but instead he emerges behind her, arms wrapping around her waist, her back meeting his smooth, firm chest.

“I think you just took ten years off my life,” he grumbles in her ear. She grins and turns to face him, clutching his shoulders and tangling their legs together.

“Sorry,” she says, unrepentant.

With their legs twined, he can’t keep them afloat and he sputters as his mouth and nose dip below the water.

“Is there somewhere we can stand?” He asks, reaching up to tuck a wet strand of hair behind her ear. His other hand spans her entire back, holding her close.

For once, she doesn’t overthink it.

“Over here,” she says, and disentangles to kick lazily toward the waterfall itself. The pool is shallowest near the cliff face, but Clarke doesn’t plant her feet against the current. She catches Bellamy’s waist with her foot, wraps her legs around him, lets him press her back against the rock.

Drops of water slide down his nose, drip from his hair as he leans in and presses his lips to the spot on her shoulder that belongs to him. He slides them delicately up the column of her neck, gives her a chase kiss behind her ear.

Clarke about bursts into flames right there in the water.

She tangles her fingers in his hair, breathes his name, and then his lips are on hers. He kisses like she always thought he would: passionate and relentless, and, dare she even say it, lovingly. His hand comes up to the back of her neck like it does when they hug, burying in her hair and holding her to him. Like it would ever occur to her to back away.

They stay there for what feels like hours, until their lips are numb and their toes are pruning, and Clarke has thoroughly introduced herself to much of the new skin she’d never seen before today.

“Think we should go back?” Bellamy rasps at last. Clarke nuzzles into his neck and sighs, loosening the loop of her arms and legs around him.

“That would be the responsible thing to do,” she agrees. He hums and doesn’t move, the water sloshing against the rock the only thing she hears for a while.

“This doesn’t--” He pauses, clears his throat. “This can be whatever you want it to be. We don’t ever have to mention it again, if you don’t want to. I’m-- following your lead.”

Clarke draws back, frowning. Heart fracturing, preparing to break.

“Is that what you want?” She asks, fearing the answer.

“No.” He wets his lips. “If I told you everything I want with you, I’m afraid I’d scare you off.”

“What part of what we just did makes you think I’m scared?” She asks, twisting a curl around her finger and tugging teasingly.

“I know it’s been a while for you,” he says, careful. Slow. New Bellamy, as she thinks of him. “The way you were looking at me back there-- I just don’t want to get my hopes up. It would really help me out if you could tell me what you’re thinking right about now.”

Clarke laughs softly and leans back to see him better. He looks nervous. Scared, even. Afraid of what she might do to the fragile pieces of himself he has exposed to her.

“Bellamy,” she says, fond. “The way I feel about you-- it has nothing to do with all of _this_.” She runs her hands down his arms, down his sides, strokes over his ribs. “It’s about this,” she tells him, placing one hand over his heart, her pulse skittering as it thumps against her palm.

His eyelids flutter. He swallows hard and leans in to kiss her again, sweeter and so heady she feels drunk on him when he pulls back at last.

“So it’s about my pecs, huh?”

Clarke shakes her head and bites his shoulder gently, both of them laughing. He sets her down and takes her hand again, leading her to the edge and out of the water at last.

“Yeah,” she decides, watching him hoist himself out. “I’m definitely in love with you because of your pecs.”

His breath catches and he pulls her to him, kissing her soundly again. One of his hands travels from her waist to rest over her heart, a mirror of the gesture she’d made moments before.

“I love you because of this too,” he says. She breaks the kiss to grin.

"I do have a great rack.”

He laughs and steps back, taking her hand again as they start the hike back up to the others.

“I’m glad you knew what I meant by that,” he jokes, pulling her into his side and nuzzling her hair. She pats his (unfairly toned) stomach affectionately and pulls away.

“Yep,” she agrees. “Sounds like we’re on the same page.”


End file.
